Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs is to open a new ‘antenna’ office in the heart of US technological innovation – Silicon Valley to focus on cloud and software defined networking (SDN).

A team of Bell Labs researchers will be co-located at Alcatel-Lucent’s site in Mountain View and will conduct focused, globally-orientated research aimed at evolving networks to deliver new cloud-based applications and services.

Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs maintains a leading role in research and innovation with a focus on how networks should evolve based on the changing behaviors and demands of the end user. Research at ‘antenna’ locations such as that in Silicon Valley contributes to this overall objective by centering on one major industry issue.

These smaller, highly-specialized locations foster a more nimble ‘start-up’ like environment to allow researchers to actively engage with Alcatel-Lucent’s businesses, other Bell Labs researchers and external stakeholders such as enterprises, universities and other research organizations.

The Silicon Valley center will be the third Bell Labs antenna office to open this year, following the opening of the Cambridge video facility in the UK in July and the Bell Labs virtualization research facility in Israel which opened in May.

The antenna will be led by Bell Labs Consulting SDN/NFV group leader Sanjay Kamat who, in his previous role, was responsible for strategy and operations of the Bell Labs Advisory Services practice focused on techno-economic issues related to emerging technologies. He has a PhD in Computer Science from Texas A&M University and MBA from Columbia University.

Marcus Weldon, president, Bell Labs & CTO Alcatel-Lucent said, “As we add this third antenna location to our existing Bell Labs network we expect to tap both the innovative spirit of the rich west coast-based technology community as well as the wealth of real-world knowledge from Alcatel-Lucent’s successful IP Routing business and its SDN start-up, Nuage Networks, to significantly change the course of the future.”